Practical Benefits of Stain-Resistant Jumpsuits
by BiblioMatsuri
Summary: At this point, the unfortunate members of Casper High Parent-Teacher Association have grown resigned to the Fentons' collective disaster-generating effect on their meetings.


Written for DP World Building Week 2017, Day 1: Sandbox Characters. Ensemble piece, outsider POV on the Fentons. Set pre- _Reality Trip_ , otherwise TWT. Warnings for brief mostly-offscreen violence and general ecto-ickiness.

* * *

Tucker is slouched into the couch cushions, watching a marathon airing of the Terminatrix animated spin-off series, when Dad flops down on the other end of the couch and starts making frustrated noises at nothing in particular.

Tucker, having experience with such embarrassing behaviors, ignores him. If Dad was actually trying to have a conversation, he'd be using words.

"Tucker?"

...yeah, never mind that last thought. "What's up, Dad?"

"You know I have a PTA meeting in half an hour."

"Mm-hmm." On screen, Terminatrix kicks a robot bad-guy's head off.

"The Fentons are on snack duty."

Two more robots try to ambush her, but she's obviously too badass and WAIT. "Uh, what?"

"The Fentons are on snack duty," he says, again, in what he's pretty sure is the exact same tone of voice as last time.

"...uh. Should I go buy flowers? Or maybe some get well cards for you and Mom?"

Dad lifts his head from his hands to look at Tucker. It's pretty mild for a glare, more like low-key disapproval to be honest.

Tucker grins. "Okay, I guess not. But seriously, though, what's wrong with Mrs. F's cooking? Her brownie recipes are amazing."

"Her recipes are fine," Dad agrees. "Mostly. It's her cookware I don't trust."

Tucker nods.

"I've seen the Fentons' kitchen," he continues.

He nods again. Probably this wasn't the time to bring up that time the Fenton Micro-Oven reanimated the mini-pizzas, or that time the sink turned into a hagfish mouth and almost ate Danny's arm, or – he swallows down the shudder climbing up his back – the hot dog incident.

"Why are we talking about the Fentons' kitchen?" Mom asks, leaning over Tucker's head.

"Maddie Fenton has snack duty," Dad says patiently.

She freezes in place. "You think I could plead stomachache?"

"I think I'm taking doggy bags and accidentally losing them in a garbage can on my way back."

She nods. "I love you, Maurice."

"Wait to say that until after we get back alive, and without food poisoning." Dad shudders.

Tucker decides not to point out that he's eaten Mrs. Fenton's cooking like a million times, and he's in perfectly fine- okay, he was in _pretty okay_ shape these days. Mostly he didn't say it because it didn't take his awesome genius brain to figure out how that would go: Mom and Dad would want him to go to the hospital for a checkup. And it's not like normal doctors even know what the symptoms of ectoplasm poisoning look like! He is _not_ getting his stomach pumped.

Instead, Tucker focuses his attention back on the screen. Cut to a commercial for punnily-named stain remover. The 'before' and 'after' pictures would have been cooler with time-lapse, in his opinion, but nobody ever asked for that.

His parents file out when he's not looking. Mom's got her war face on, and Dad still looks like a kicked puppy. ...or he just has a really sad game face, both are true.

The episode closes out on Terminatrix making her daring escape from The Secret Agents of the Mysterious Agency for the nineteenth time – this is episode twenty, and _all of them_ starting with the hour-long pilot have the exact same ending scene. He's pretty sure the artists were just changing the backgrounds around and reusing the stock animation.

Maybe an hour later, Tucker's making an after-dinner snack out of last night's leftover chili when Mom and Dad get home. They have green glop-stains on their clothes, and they're both acting like they've just seen a lot of ghost-related what-the-fuckery (hashtag LifeInAmityPark).

Dad sounds like he's still in a pretty good mood, which is good. Mom looks like she's going to take a forty-minute shower and then hog the TV, which is honestly a way more reasonable reaction to Fenton cooking.

And they're both still in one piece. Things like that are why he'd thought his parents were secretly superheroes In disguise, up through sixth grade. Leftovers and reruns got old, back then.

Now he's just glad today's ghost-related mess is... actually, honestly, none of his business.

June Ishiyama is just going to go around and double-check to make sure all the fire exits are clear before the meeting starts, thank-you-very-much.

And then check in on the janitors, and she'd ask her secretary to prepare the forms for the inevitable hazard pay they'd claim for cleaning up a Fenton mess, but her last secretary quit and Lancer is busy.

Oh, then she has to check in with Lancer about a substitute for the science classes, and call Falluca to make sure he was going to be back in next week – oh, and sign off on the order for replacement glassware.

Her email alert dings, and she refreshes the page. The superintendent wants to drop in and see how she's doing with all this ghost nonsense (read: perform a surprise inspection and see if he can get her fired or transferred down for being crazy) which is perfectly reasonable, and understandable, and she is absolutely one-hundred-percent not going to scream.

If she gets through tonight without being hospitalized, she's going to go home, and turn her phone off, and rewatch the _Chronicle of the Witch Milly_ movie, and everyone else can just keep their own emergencies to themselves for a few hours.

Pamela allows Jeremy twelve minutes more than usual in the bathroom before she starts to tap her foot at him. On the bathroom door.

"Five more minutes!"

Pamela gingerly sniffs the air for stomach-upset odors. All seems un-amiss. "It's been fifteen minutes, Jeremy. How long do you need to fix your hair?"

"My hair is fine," he says through the door.

"Well, your tie, then?"

"That's fine, too."

"Did your dinner disagree with you?" she asks impatiently.

"No, but I'm not going."

She huffs, and yanks the door open. Jeremy is, as she'd more than half-expected, pacing around the master bath and projecting nervousness. "Really, now? This is what you're doing?"

"I don't mind normal PTA meetings-"

The immediately-following _Even if they're horrifically dull, and I never had your head for business anyway, and you know it,_ goes unsaid thanks to all the times it's _been_ said.

"-but are we really actually going this month?" His face screws up into a half-worried, half-terrified grimace. "Can't we just skip out, this once?"

"If you want to miss out on an irreplaceable opportunity to better the quality of our daughter's education, then that's your decision. I, for one, am going."

"Oh." His shoulders slump with suddenly-relieved tension. And now, of course he looks guilty about it – as if he has anything to be guilty about!

"Yes, 'oh'. I'm the last one likely to blame you for wanting to avoid those disaster-prone maniacs under any conditions, never mind when it's their turn to bring snacks."

Pamela will never admit it, not even under threat of torture, but her voice does wobble a bit when she utters that last foreboding phrase. She hadn't forgotten the last time the Fentons and food were even remotely anywhere near each other.

She is fairly sure there are still reanimated-turkey leavings somewhere on the grounds. _Something_ is responsible for otherwise ordinary shrubbery glowing green and sprouting teeth, at any rate.

Why that family's experiments so often end with otherwise innocuous everyday objects developing excessive dentition on so very many and incredibly varied occasions, Pamela simply can't fathom; but, she has a pair of driving gloves and sensible shoes and a good thick coat laid out, just in case.

'Always plan out an escape route' is, unfortunately, quite solid advice when dealing with the Fentons' particular brand of infectious insanity.

"Now, Jeremy." Pamela raises her eyebrows. "Get yourself off the toilet and stop looking like a kicked dog at me. I'm sure you can dig up something productive and charitable enough to do that it excuses your sudden, unexplained absence."

Her husband dutifully stops looking quite so much like a kicked dog at her. "Well, it _is_ a routine meeting, isn't it? No proposed changes to any school policies this week?"

"Not to my knowledge."

Jeremy mysteriously appears much as though his mood and health have much improved, all of a sudden.

Pamela sighs, turns away, and leaves the master bath. Jeremy will either be buried in legal minutiae, or on the telephone arguing with one of his old school friends inside of ten minutes, one or the other.

Meanwhile, _she_ would actually be attending the social function she'd specifically planned the evening around, like a sensible person.

When Susan Tetslaff sees the PTA meeting roster for that day, she laughs hard enough to hurt her stomach.

She's still laughing, a little, when she finally pulls out of the school parking lot after her last class ends and heads gleefully home.

Dominic Sanchez lets himself collapse into a plastic chair, no longer caring about the obnoxious smallness of a chair made for tiny midget people. Teenagers. Whichever.

At his right, Emilia watches, dead-eyed, as the gelatinous creature in the punch bowl overflows its container and starts to try to eat the table. On the bright side, at least the casserole is now occupied with trying to kill it back.

" _¿Querido...?_ " she murmurs.

"Yes, dear?"

Across the room, Pamela Manson is attempting to wrestle her hair back from what had been a simple but apparently safe-to-eat arrangement of vegetables and dip.

Approximately twenty minutes into the meeting, that dip had sprouted many, many teeth, as well as tongues. It had then assimilated the vegetables, grown legs, and started trying to eat people's hair and clothing. Possibly the dip-creature preferred vegetable fibers, and Mrs. Manson's hair was a wig.

Dominic had not really ever wanted to think about either of those things.

"We are never letting the Fentons have snack duty, ever again. I would rather eat the Manson girl's experimental cooking than this."

Considering the food had just been trying to eat him? "Absolutely."

He looks up at a strange noise, fearing the worst; but no, it's nothing. Just the overhead sprinklers turning on.

...wait, this room has no sprinklers.

And _now_ there is slimy-sticky green mystery gunk covering everything, including Emila and himself. On the bright side, it appears to have frozen the snack-monsters in place.

Angela Foley digs a pair of scissors out of her purse and starts to cut the understandably furious Mrs. Manson free of the dip-thing.

Dominic gives up. The next time it's the Fentons' turn to bring snacks to the PTA meeting, he will be staying home sick that night.

Edward Lancer swears under his breath and scrapes green goop out of his eyes as best he can.

He tries again to gather his wits back up from wherever the universe's endless indifference has scattered them this time. He has limited success, which is still more than could be said for this year's PTA newbies. Meeting the Fentons is always hard on the uninitiated.

Jack Fenton swings across the room on a cable. Somehow, the ceiling doesn't collapse on anyone's head.

Edward muses that he might have to accept this one as a win, because it certainly isn't going to come out in the wash.


End file.
